Free Web NovelChapter 1: They Voted On Her
The rope was cutting into her wrists again.
April had stopped pulling against it twenty minutes ago, or maybe it had been an hour, and time had gone strange since they left.
The zip ties they had used on her ankles were the heavy-duty kind, the orange ones they had looted from a hardware store three weeks ago. She knew exactly which store. After all, she had been the one to find them.
But she never thought she would be the one it would be used on in the end.
The street around her was quiet. People don’t roam around much, not with the infestations and danger levels. So, the world was mostly always quiet now. Though not peaceful, but hollow, like the silence itself was holding its breath.
The afternoon sun sat low and ugly behind a sky the color of a bruise, casting everything in that reddish-brown light that she had stopped being able to look at directly because it made every surface look like it was bleeding. Two cars sat abandoned in the middle of the road, doors hanging open. A child’s dirty, abandoned sneaker lay near the curb. Just one. You don’t have to wonder where the other one went.
Maybe they ate it... along with the child. Or maybe the child got away with it.
April kept her eyes on the sneaker. It was easier than looking at the pole they had tied her to. freeweɓnøvel.com
"Someone will come back," she whispered, though her voice came out smaller than she intended. "They just needed to get clear. Someone will come back."
She was shivering, even as she tried to convince herself of this.
Lena had not looked at her when they tied her up. That was the thing April kept returning to, turning over in her mind like a stone she couldn’t put down. Lena, whom April had carried on her back for two kilometers when she, Lena, sprained her ankle. Lena, whom April had given her last tin of sardines to, because Lena had said she felt faint. Lena had stood behind Cai the whole time, her arms crossed tight over her chest. She had looked at the ground and had not said a single word. That was some comfort.
It had been Cai who crouched down in front of April with that calm, reasonable expression he always wore when he had already made up his mind and just needed to explain it to you like you were slow to understand or hard of hearing.
"We need to draw them east," he had said. "You understand that, right? If we don’t split the herd, none of us makes it to the checkpoint. This is the only way."
April was scared. She was trembling and scared. Her fingers had been shaking so badly, but she clasped them tightly together.
"T-Then... You could leave supplies," April had said. Her voice had been steady then, even though her fingers were shaking. She had still believed, at that point, that there was a version of this conversation where she walked away. "Cut the ties loose after. Give me a chance to run."
Cai had looked at her with something that might have been pity, if pity had anything warm left in it. "The noise needs to last," he said. "You understand, don’t you?"
Then he had stood up, and they had walked away. Mei had been the only one who looked back, but even Mei had kept walking.
"W-wait, you... You have to come back." April stuttered, reaching her bound hands over and pulling her body, but her ankles were joined together and bound to a pole. "You... you have to. Come back!!!"
April had screamed for a while after that, her heart wrenching in fear. Why did she let them do this to her? It wasn’t like she wanted to be a scapegoat. They... they voted. They all thought she would be a better bait and told her to be obedient.
She was stupid. So stupid, but she... she just wanted to survive.
Her breath came out in heavy and uneven hitches, listening to the heavy pounding of her heartbeat.
And then, she stayed silent, staring at the sneaker, still trying to assure herself that they would come back.
And then after a while, the fear and anxiety of the quiet streets and uncertainty clawed at her heart, causing her heart to beat even faster.
It had been hours, she was sure. And they were not back yet. What if they don’t come back? What if they leave her here? What if... what if...? What if the zombies come first?
Her panicked pupils dilated, shaking violently, and then she began to scream.
"CAI!" The name ripped out of her throat, raw and ragged, bouncing off the empty storefronts and dying in the dead air. "CAI, PLEASE! LENA! LENA, COME BACK!"
But nothing answered her. Not even an echo.
She wasn’t ashamed of the screaming. She yanked at the zip ties until she felt the skin on her wrists split open, until warm blood was running down into her palms and making her grip slick and useless. She kept pulling anyway, yelling, and screaming, "MEI! MEI, I KNOW YOU’RE STILL CLOSE, PLEASE—"
Her voice broke on the last word and dissolved into something that wasn’t language anymore. She cried the way she hadn’t cried since she was a child — heaving, ugly, breathless sobs that bent her forward against the rope, snot and tears running freely down her face, her whole body shaking so hard the pole rattled faintly against the concrete behind her.
When the crying burned itself out, she started bargaining. Out loud, to no one, to the empty street and the hollow windows staring down at her.
"I’ll take less food," she said. Her voice was wrecked, barely above a whisper. "I won’t—I won’t complain about the portions anymore, I swear. I’ll scout ahead. Every day, alone, I’ll go first. You won’t even have to ask me." She swallowed. "I’ll be more useful. I know I haven’t been—I know I’ve been slow lately, I know I have, but I can do better. I can do better, just—"
She stopped.
The street said nothing back, and it killed her.
"Please," she whispered to no one, biting her bottom lip as her face bunched in fear. "Please don’t leave me here." She whispered, but even then, nobody came back.
Well, no living human came back, because something did come.
A zombie.
The first zombie came around the corner of the intersection.
It had been a man once, heavyset, still wearing a reflective construction vest over a shirt that had gone completely black with old blood.
It moved the way they all moved when they hadn’t caught a scent yet—that loose, rolling shuffle, head swinging side to side. April pressed herself back against the pole and stopped breathing, her hands pressed to her mouth.
Zombies have bad eyesight. So if she just... stays quiet... but how could she stay absolutely quiet when she was so scared?
Her breathing was too heavy, and the way she was shaking rattled the pole, causing the zombie to swing its head toward her.
The zombie started coming faster, knowing she was there, and she couldn’t even pretend to stay quiet.
She started screaming again, because there was nothing else left to do. Pure animal sound, no words in it. Calling out, pleading... Begging...
The construction worker lurched into a run, and she heard more sounds from further down the street—that wet, rattling chorus that meant more were turning toward the noise, exactly as Cai had planned, because he was always right about things like this, tactically, strategically, and that was why they had followed him, and that was why she had believed him when he said she was part of the team.
The zombie reached her and opened its rotten mouth. She kicked and swung her joined fists, but it did no good. The first bite took her in the shoulder, and the pain was so gruesome but for a second it didn’t feel like pain at all, just pressure, just wrongness, the world rearranging itself around a fact it hadn’t asked her permission for.
Then the nerve signals caught up, and she heard herself making a sound she didn’t recognize as human. ƒrēewebnoѵёl.cσm
More of them reached her. Two, three, four... ten... She stopped being able to count, the pain and the fear grilling her completely.
At some point, between one ragged breath and the next, April found herself thinking about a morning ten years ago—standing at a window in a cramped attic room, watching the family she worked for hold their daughter in the courtyard below.
She had been so angry that morning. She had gone back downstairs and finished the ironing and had not said a word to anyone about what was eating her alive from the inside.
She wanted to leave then, while everyone was joyous and merry. Steal some money and leave. If that had happened, would she have been in a different situation now? Would she have found people who actually cared about her in this damned world?
What a waste, she thought, in the strange calm that had settled over her as her body began to stop registering the damage, ripped apart in several directions, zombies fighting for scraps of her flesh. It was a complete and total waste of a life.
The last thing she saw was the sky. That terrible, bruised, reddish-brown sky, sitting heavy and indifferent over everything.
Then the teeth found her throat, and the sky went dark. April died on a street whose name she had never learned, tied to a pole, alone.
She had not been anyone’s protagonist. She was never a main character.
She had just been useful to those who were, until she wasn’t.
